Firstborn
by izziehuett
Summary: We know very little about Adam's life. This is just some creative speculation on my part about what made him the angry young man of the first 'Saw.' Please drop me a line if you like this; I want to know if I've made fellow Saw fans happy!


firstborn

summary: We know very little about Adam's pre-Jigsaw life. This is just some creative speculation on my part on what might have made Adam who he was.

notes: I've chosen New York City as the setting of the Saw films, which is an open question (some people favor L.A.). I've also gone with the timeline that says about two years elapse over the course of all seven films.

_"Lawrence, I have a family too. I don't see them, that's my mistake. It's a mistake I'd like to fix."_

_- Adam, Saw (I)_

New York City

On a cold gray late-November morning, an Airbus lifts off from LaGuardia, circles over the Hudson River, and heads west. This 8 a.m. flight carries 229 passengers, a mix of business travelers and off-season vacationers. In first class is a man who needs the extra legroom, stretching out a limb that ends in a prosthetic foot. His cane rests between the arm of his seat and the canvas-covered ribs of the plane's body.

This man travels neither for business nor pleasure, but on a personal errand. As the plane banks steeply and finds its westward course, he eases his seat back as far as it will recline and turns his face toward the clouds. A flight attendant pauses in the aisle and the solicitous question - _Anything to drink, sir? _- fades from her lips. The thousand-yard expression on his face tells her to move on. She does.

Slowly the attendant rolls the beverage cart rearward. The heels of her shoes dig into the aisle carpet, caught as they are between her body weight and the tremors of the airframe. Near the very last rows, she pours a diet 7-up and chats with a passenger, careful to speak up: the vacuum-cleaner roar of the engines is loudest here. Her strawberry-painted lips curve upward in a bright, professional smile, unaware that there is a coffin five feet directly underneath her kitten heels. Jarringly out of place among the among the suitcases and snowboards and golf bags of the cargo hold, the casket's polished gunmetal-colored body, too, shivers in faint sympathy with the vibrations of the plane.

* * *

Colorado, later the same day

Mary Faulkner pulled a rack of marinating ribs from the lowest shelf of the refrigerator. Since dropping back to half-days at the office, she'd started making more ambitious meals. A sea change from the many weeknight dinners of fish sticks or chicken nuggets they'd all eaten in years past, when she worked full-time and had three growing kids to feed. She peeled back plastic wrap and sniffed delicately at the rosemary-and-brown-sugar marinade that -

_"Mom? I'm going over to Kim's tonight, I won't be home for dinner, okay?" _

Mary's right hand twitched and lost its grip on the pan. The ribs slid sideways and fell to the linoleum with a sloppy wet impact.

_Boomer. It was just Boomer. _

But God, she'd never heard him sound so much like Adam.

The voice from upstairs had been her youngest child, her son Robert Jr., who everyone called 'Boomer.' And Kim, she realized, was probably the pretty blonde cheerleader her son had been paying so much attention to in study groups in their living room. But Adam had had a close friend named Kim, and he'd yelled down the stairs in much the same way. The voice, the tone, the name: all of it had come together to give her the feeling of someone walking over her grave.

_Your _own_ grave? _an arch inner voice asked.

Mary hurriedly scooped the ribs up as footsteps pounded down the stairs. She was wiping marinade from her hands by the time her son appeared in the kitchen doorway. Boomer looked very little like his older brother, or more accurately, half-brother. Boomer was tall, with the build of a young ox; the nickname came from his brutal hits on the football field.

He asked, "It's okay I won't be here for dinner, right?"

"Is Kim the girl from your study group?" Mary asked. "Blonde hair, petite?"

Boomer flushed.

Mary got her son to write down the girl's full name and her parents' phone number before she gave her blessing. Immediately afterward, Boomer headed out, waving lightly. He didn't ask, _Mom, is something wrong? _

Adam would have, Mary thought as she watched her son cross in front of the kitchen window like a plane through airspace. Adam would have seen that something had unsettled her. Just like Adam wouldn't have been meeting up with anyone from a study group, because Adam had never _needed_ study groups. He hadn't always cared about his schoolwork as much as Mary would have liked, but his natural intelligence always saw him through to passing grades.

No, there were few similarities between Mary's older and younger sons, and generally she found that reassuring. It wasn't that she didn't _want_ to be reminded of her firstborn. In fact, sometimes she was afraid she'd stop opening her eyes to see him standing by the bed at 3 a.m. Hypnogogic hallucinations, the therapist had called them, meaning the came as you drifted into or out of sleep. They were fairly common, not symptomatic of mental illness. Mary's were so detailed, though: Adam's pale moon face and close-set eyes, the eyes that had given him the gaze of a watchful housecat. And always wearing a white T-shirt and jeans. Just standing by the bed, not speaking, looking at her. Then she'd blink and he'd be gone.

How typically Adam, not to make enough effort to come back in dreams - the kind with action and dialogue - but just a hallucination. Just like it was pure Adam not to dress up; he always wore a simple white T-shirt and jeans.

Mary sniffed a laugh, but tears were threatening. She fumbled quickly for the tissues she always had nearby. When she'd blinked them away - false alarm - she decided to stick the ribs back in the refrigerator and take an afternoon walk. The house was too quiet: Boomer gone, Robert at work, and Alicia, Mary's middle child and only daughter, away at college.

Just outside the front door, Mary jammed her hands into her quilted green parka and gave a quick glance to the house next door. The property had been purchased last summer by a couple from Denver. They'd had the old house torn down to the studs and rebuilt with 500 extra square feet. Now it was the finest home on the block, probably the whole subdivision. Money was moving into the area.

The neighborhood had been humbler when she and Robert had moved in. Humble, but quiet and secure. Mary and Robert Faulkner had shopped around for the ideal neighborhood in which to raise their children: the ones they planned to have and, of course, the one Mary already brought to the marriage. They'd checked out the schools and the crime rates and even the sex-offender database, all to find a place where their children would be safe.

And they had been. Until Jigsaw.

_That's never been proven. Don't you _ever_ think that._

Sometimes Mary Faulkner allowed herself to admit that Adam might be dead, but it was a whole different thing to accept that he might have been killed by the man the press had called 'The Jigsaw Killer.' That prospect made her wake up in the night with a heavy weight on her chest, sucking the breath out of her lungs. Mary had never wanted to know anything about how the Jigsaw victims had died, but as the man's unholy legend grew, the details had slipped past her defenses. She only needed to stand in the wrong line at the supermarket, look over the wrong shoulder at an open tabloid, and she'd be plunged into the crime scene photos. Black, brackish blood drying on cement floors. Bits of flesh still on hooks.

That was _not_ how her firstborn son had died.

Her eyes stung again. She blinked several times, and then she wasn't seeing the quiet wintry streets around her. She was seeing an obstetrician's office as it had been when she was carrying Adam. Her OB/GYN had been a imposing, gray-haired man who'd known all the answers. Certainly, he'd sounded that way when he'd explained the reasons why they needed to induce labor.

The baby was _late,_ he'd said, as if an infant had important engagements to keep. Induced labor was perfectly safe, he'd said, absolutely nothing to worry about. Mary had taken his word for it. Twenty-year-old women with only a high school degree didn't question fifty-something men with M.D. behind their name. Especially when that 20-year-old had no ring on her finger.

Oh, Mary had tried to tell herself that there was no shame in being pregnant outside of marriage, not in the year 1980. And Johnny Radford was going to marry her, just as soon as he had a better job lined up. But somewhere under the exterior of Thoroughly Modern Mary was a girl ashamed of being an unwed mother. Maybe that was why she'd swallowed her concerns and nodded as her doctor explained things, and then agreed to an induced labor.

She'd winced when they'd told her the baby's weight: not even five pounds. Two days later, Adam had a seizure and spent 96 hours in the neonatal crisis unit. Mary silently castigated herself for signing the consent form. She'd realized then that her doctor must have miscalculated how far along she was on her first visit, which had thrown off his entire timeline for her pregnancy. Adam hadn't been late; the induced labor had been premature.

In years to come, she would read about traumatic births and the lifelong effects they could have on children. But immediately after bringing Adam home, Mary didn't have the time or energy for research. Adam squalled in rage at having been born, howled as though lashing out at the world. Mary had literally worn out a path in the living-room carpet walking her baby back and forth at all hours. Before his birth, she had thought that was a cliche.

_Was this what motherhood was going to be like? _she'd thought, praying for her tiny, furious son to finally sleep. She tried not to think about what other damage premature labor might have wreaked on him. Was he in pain from some malady the hospital's assessments hadn't detected? Could he be mentally delayed, or emotionally disturbed? Were these rages only the beginning?

To make matters worse, Johnny had one excuse after another for putting off the wedding. Listening to those excuses, Mary had struggled not to entertain a traitorous thought: was their own son driving him away?

Then, unexpectedly, the storm blew over. Adam began to smile and laugh; he started sleeping through the night. Mary was so relieved that she wept quietly with her forehead against the top railing of the crib.

Her other concerns proved unfounded. Adam was obviously not delayed; he said his first word and took his first steps on the pediatrician's schedule. He was healthy, too, though he'd never be big. Adam was always among the smallest boys in his class. Inevitably, there were schoolyard fights. Adam learned to defend himself on his own, with no help from his father. The much-postponed wedding had never happened, and Johnny Radford walked out for good when his son was two years old.

Adam had never borne his name. While carrying him, Mary had thought of her son as Adam Radford, but the hospital had put her maiden name on his birth certificate. _It's the rules,_ she'd thought when she'd seen it.

Years later, when Mary met and married a steady and good man, she'd given Adam his last name: Faulkner. They'd really tried, she and Robert, to make theirs a truly blended family. During her second pregnancy, she'd laid awake at night worrying whether Adam would resent the sister who was coming.

Mary needn't have worried. Adam liked being a big brother almost from the first. The age gap helped. Adam had been eight when Alicia had arrived, ten for Robert Jr.'s birth: old enough not to feel a small child's reflexive jealousy at being supplanted. The wide difference in their ages had also guaranteed the hero worship they'd felt for him. Alicia and Rob had adored Adam, running after him as though he were an ice-cream truck. He'd responded by teaching and teasing and looking out for them. Most of the time. But as the moodiness of adolescence set in, sometimes he'd wedge a chair under his doorknob and drown out their knocking and pleading with the sounds from his iPod.

Adam and his stepfather - well, that had never been a perfect fit. Some of it was just a personality clash. Robert was the kind of person who could say _There should be a rule for everything and everyone should know the rule_ without irony. Adam, in contrast, had been cynical practically since he'd been old enough to have opinions.

It was adolescence, again, that exacerbated things. As Adam neared manhood, something bristling and territorial had sprung up between him and his stepfather. Maybe it was inevitable, almost evolutionary: Adam was the next-oldest male in the household, and the only child not related to Robert by blood. Maybe it was only natural that they'd clash.

Mary knew that she made excuses like that a lot. She was self-aware enough to ask herself if her excuses crossed the line into delusions. She'd always wanted so badly to believe that Adam had felt at home in their family. But if that were true, why had he left them so early? He'd been just eighteen when he went to New York. Mary had wanted him to apply to schools in Colorado: state colleges, since his scattershot grades made a higher-ranked university out of reach. But Adam was determined to strike out on his own, making his living with his photographer's eye.

That didn't mean he was unhappy at home. History was full of headstrong, gifted young people who'd left the nest young. But one detail nagged at Mary: had Adam reverted to using her maiden name, his earliest name, in New York City? How else could 'Stanheight' have ended up on his FBI file? She'd seen it in her one trip to New York, but hadn't had the emotional strength to ask about it. She'd sat listening to the detectives talk about the case, as overwhelmed as she'd ever been in the obstetrician's office.

Later, she wished she'd asked, because that one unexplained detail spoke of a world of alienation. Had her son with his fluid last name never really known who he was? Had he gone to New York because when you don't belong anywhere, the best place to be is somewhere huge and anonymous?

Another thing the tabloids had taught Mary: John Kramer used to cut a jigsaw shape out of his victims' flesh, to signify that they had a 'missing piece' in their psyche, their lives. Had that been true of Adam? Could John Kramer have understood her son more clearly than she?

The great elm tree loomed ahead, the one at which she normally turned around and headed for home. Today she didn't. She kept walking, walking fast.

Memories pressed in on her. Like jigsaw pieces, they didn't cohere. Adam yelling that he hated his stepfather; Adam thanking Robert for his first camera. Adam holding Alicia on his shoulders to put a star on the top of the Christmas tree. Adam coming into the house late, walking and speaking so carefully that Mary knew he must be stoned. Adam shaking Robert's hand, so uncommonly grown-up, before getting on the plane for New York. Alicia crying on the sofa at home, refusing to ride along to come to the airport, having expected to the last that her older brother would change his mind and stay.

Mary had watched Adam disappear down the jetway and thanked God that the child leaving for New York was her son, not her daughter, because you didn't have to worry about sons alone in a big city the way you did daughters.

Thoughts to make God laugh.

Getting ready for bed that night, Mary had confided to her husband that Adam would soon realize he needed a college education, that he couldn't make it on just talent and two cameras. Robert had remained tactfully silent.

In time, his doubt had been proven right. When he called home, Adam never talked about college. He didn't say much about how his photography career was going, either, a silence that didn't suggest a great success. One year, then two, yawned between Adam's visits home to Colorado. He called home less and less frequently. His sister and brother talked about him less often as well, drawing closer to friends at school instead.

Then Adam stopped calling entirely. A police detective named Allison Kerry did, instead.

His disappearance was unnerving enough; Mary tried to keep her children from hearing about the police's Jigsaw theory. Of course, she failed. Boomer put his fist through the drywall in the garage. Alicia, who Mary had never seen finish a glass of champagne on New Year's Eve, got so blind drunk that two friends could barely get her through the front door.

The pieces of this puzzle would never quite cohere; Mary knew that now. They were like a 1000-piece jigsaw with only 996 in the box: maddeningly incomplete. Where were those last few pieces that would make everything make sense? In the mind of John Kramer? His cold brain had long since been pried from his skull. His reasons for targeting Adam were forever trapped in dead neurons.

And the detectives and agents who'd investigated Kramer's reign of terror? No help there. They were all dead. They'd died one by one, but ultimately, they might as well have made a suicide charge into a machine-gun nest. What did it say about Adam's fate when even the people _investigating_ it couldn't keep themselves alive?

And that, Mary thought as she finally turned her steps toward home, was why she clung to the memory of her son's most marked characteristic: his anger. Because that anger gave her hope that maybe he was still alive.

The logic went like this: Among the ranks of the missing, adult males are the most likely to be 'voluntarily missing.' The late Detective Kerry had told Mary that. They walk away from lives they find unsatisfying, often without so much as a note. _It sounds cruel,_ Allison Kerry had said, _but it does happen._

Cruel it certainly would have been. What good son could vanish so completely, leaving his mother to wonder and worry? What kind of son was that?

One who hadn't died in one of Jigsaw's nightmare devices, of course. So now that was the only remotely happy ending possible, that Adam hadn't been a Jigsaw victim, nor a murder victim at all, but had been alienated enough to walk away from his life without a single explanation to the people he'd left behind.

If that were so, there was hope. Perhaps time would soften him, and he would realize how much he was loved. Someday he'd regret his choice and come home. Boomer would take a swing at him. Alicia would get drunk again and call him filthy names no one knew she knew. Hell, Mary thought, probably they'd _all_ get drunk. And cry. And then laugh, because Adam had always been able to make them laugh.

She wondered how Robert would react, on that unlikely but much-hoped-for day. Robert had cared about Adam, but Mary knew that he'd never really understood their mother-son relationship. Never would. He'd known how _much_ she loved Adam, but he'd never understood how she did. Robert, being a conventional thinker, had sententiously believed that she'd loved Adam in spite of his anger and alienation and cynicism. That wasn't true. She'd loved Adam _because_ of those things.

Her firstborn had been so difficult in his first months of life, yet that was precisely how he'd won her over. As she'd worn a path in the living room carpet, he'd worn his way into her heart. She'd begun to root for her scrappy, angry four-and-a-half pound son in a way she'd never to required to on behalf of her later children. She had become Adam's partisan, and maybe - God, you weren't supposed to admit this - maybe she'd loved him just a little more than the later two.

Mary let the tears come at last, and fall, though she dashed them away with a hard knuckle against her cheekbone.

By the time she turned onto her own street, she was calm, though she stiffened slightly when she saw the front porch of the Faulkner house. A man stood facing the door in the self-conscious stance people adopted when they'd rung a doorbell but were increasingly sure that no one was coming to answer it.

Mary's heart always sped up when a stranger came to the door, but quickly she sensed that the visitor was no cop. She'd met plenty of them in the past few years; she knew how they dressed and held themselves. At close range, she probably knew on a subconscious level how they _smelled_. Something about this man didn't say _cop_ to her. Not to mention that he was leaning on a cane.

The man turned away from the door, a resigned expression on his face which turned to a mildly-surprised lift of his pale brows at the sight of her. Quickly, Mary raised a hand, both in greeting and to indicate that he should stay where he was rather than descend the steps.

Seen up close, her visitor had thick blond hair with the very beginnings of gray, strong facial bones, fine conservative clothing. Educated and moneyed, she ascertained. Her eyes cut to the regal, just-remodeled house next door. _Ah,_ she thought.

"Hello," she said. "You must be one of our new neighbors."

The man didn't answer directly. "My name is Lawrence Gordon," he said, his tone easy and pleasant. "Do you think I could come in for a minute, Mrs. Faulkner?"


End file.
